Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is highly respected and thought of as an owner.
His basketball IQ is high and his ability to judge talent is also highly thought of.
The Dallas Morning News has some excerpts from an interview Cuban did during a national-TV broadcast of a Mavs summer league game.
Cuban doesn’t lack much confidence about his new roster.
Cuban was asked about losing J Kidd and gaining Elton Brand and Chris Kaman.
“You can’t replace Jason Kidd. There’s just no way. But at the same time, there’s going to be a lot of things we couldn’t do. You know, ‘J’ could take over a game defensively and he could help us get where we needed to go, but he was just a spot-up shooter. Now, we’ve got a lot of people who are going to force people to really defend us.
“(Kaman and Brand) takes a lot of pressure off of Dirk. ”Last year, you didn’t really have to defend our 5 position. You didn’t have to defend our point guard position. Now you’re going to have to defend all five, and that’s going to make life a little bit easier.”
When asked about OJ Mayo Cuban again was supremely confident…
“He can play. He knows how to impact a game. We were looking at players and one of the things Michael Finley, who’s now kind of an assistant assistant general manager, said, you want to get somebody that the other team has got to game plan for, that the other team is afraid of at the end of the game, that they can make something happen. We didn’t really have someone who could really just create off the dribble, who we could just give the ball. Jet was a great shooter, Jet did a lot of amazing things, but we needed somebody who could get a lot younger and do a lot of the same things and then some.”
Cuban was also asked about the loss of Deron Williams and other notable free-agents. Cuban again chalked that up to just preparing for future free agents.
Mark Cuban should be a politician when his ownership days are over because he did one hell of a job of spinning his lousy off-season into one of optimism.
More of the Cuban interview can be seen here at NBA TV.